Oh, you poor rich people. Why do you have to suffer so in an economic downturn? We dare to whine about stupid things like “having to choose between heating the house or buying food,” when socialites are languishing in their penthouses, fretting over whether the guests will notice they’re serving domestic champagne. But there is an upside to the downturn. Rich people wrote this week’s top five for me. I’m not making these up. These are actual ways rich people are responding to the recession, taken from newspaper and magazine articles:

5. Cutting their 17-year-old daughter’s allowance back from $100 a week to $60 a week.

4. From the daughter: not getting take-out sushi for lunch every day.

3. “Letting Yolanda go, which means I’ll have to learn to iron my own shirts.”

2. From an article describing an elegantly-dressed woman approaching a shopper using coupons: “Oh, I’ve heard about those things. Where does one get them?”

1. From the same article: “Instead of paying $250,000 to take the private jet to Singapore, I flew commercial for $20,000.”

Speaking of money, I bought a lottery ticket in Kalispell the other day. So yesterday Dean says there was a $200,000 winning ticket sold in Kalispell. I checked the numbers and hey, I’m a winner! Of four dollars. On my five dollar ticket. Guess I’ll still be ironing my own shirts. Or would be, if I ever ironed anything.

It’s a list-y time of year. Shopping lists, to-do lists, year-end “best of” and “worst of” lists, naughty/nice lists. And as my friends and colleagues in the old home state are no doubt chanting today, “We’re number one!” North Dakota topped the USA Today’s recent list of most corrupt states. Then again, their formula was based on convictions per capita, and North Dakota can pretty easily top just about any per capita-based list. But it’s good to be number one, isn’t it?

Top five ways to bribe a North Dakota politician:

5. Twenty kilos of pure white primo stuff – fresh walleye, cleaned and filleted.

4. A big North Dakota junket: free tickets to the Medora musical, plus the pitchfork fondue and two rounds of mini-golf.

3. “That’s right, Senator. My kid will snowblow your driveway and shovel your sidewalk. For the whole winter.”

2. A chance to get out of the North Dakota winter and spend a week in beautiful, balmy South Dakota.

1. “Now see, we make these legislurters . . . logislatures . . . . these government guys a free website, and then in return we tell them we want it legalized, not just decriminalated . . decriminizated . . . what were we talking about again? Hey man, any Doritos left?”

Hmm. Maybe it’s not fair to use actual conversations overheard in the workplace.

Nearly there . . .

In our little remodeling adventure that started on October 8, we've gone from this:



to this:



We now have running water in our kitchen and everything. Making a cappuccino no longer involves trips to the laundry room, the downstairs bathroom and the garage. We still need to get hardware for the cabinets and put in a backsplash. The appliances are all in and functioning, the tile floor is heated and now we just have to clean everything up and put the stuff back in. We may actually have a real homecooked meal sometime this week.

I'll post more pictures of kitchen-y goodness later. It's almost done and for a couple of losers who had no idea what they were doing, I think we did okay.

Time for Turkey

Hey, anyone can grab a Butterball and shove it in the oven. Here’s how you make a real turkey: first, you brine it. Soak it for 24 hours in enough water to cover, with ½ cup salt and ½ cup sugar for each gallon of water. Take it out, pat dry and rub with olive oil. Add salt, pepper and any other seasonings you like. Put it in a V-shaped rack in a roasting pan, breast side DOWN. Yeah, I know. That’s crazy. But all the juices from the dark meat run down into the breast, making it really, really moist.

In the bottom of the roasting pan, add white wine, water, and roughly chopped celery, carrots and onions. About an hour before it’s done, turn it breast side up to crisp up the skin. Keep adding water, wine or chicken stock to the pan. Strain the juices and thicken with a lightly toasted butter/flour roux for the best gravy you ever had.

Don’t carve the breast by taking thin slices along the length like they always do on TV. Instead, remove the whole breast, then cut thicker slices across the breast. You get little turkey breast steaks, each with a rim of delicious crispy skin.

Or you could go with one of these theme turkeys:

5. The Sarah Palin. The turkey’s free but the dressing costs $150,000.

4. The auto executive. They’ve picked all the meat off the bones and now they’re sitting around the table waiting for the government to fill their plates again.

3. The Clinton. Hope you like lots of leftovers, because this one is never going away.

2. The Dubya. You can turn up the heat and keep sticking forks in it all you want, but it still won’t be done until January 20.

1. The Karen. It’s a Swanson’s frozen turkey dinner, because our kitchen looks like this.



Those are the pieces of our living room sectional, piled up into the kitchen so the living room ceiling and walls can be textured and primed. We were just going to have the popcorn ceiling scraped, but then the contractor said he couldn’t match the existing wall texture on the places that had been patched for moving light switches and putting in the new patio door, so he’d have to texture the walls as well. That meant everything had to come out. Every other room is already stacked to the ceiling with stuff from the kitchen and dining area, so that meant the living room had to move into the kitchen.

So at the top of your list next week, be thankful you have a functioning kitchen. And that your living room furniture is in your living room.

One step forward, two steps back . . .

Everyone who has that awful popcorn stuff on your ceilings, raise your hands. Not too high -- you don't want to touch that horrible crap. We had it in every room, including the dining/living room adjacent to the kitchen. So we thought that as long as we have the big mess anyway, we might as well get the ceilings scraped. I thought that would be one of the first steps in the whole project.

Me, day one: "So you're going to start with the ceiling, right?"
Contractor: "Nah, we'll do plumbing and wiring first."

Me, day two: "So now you're going to do the ceiling, right?"
Contractor: "Nah, we'll do some drywall today."

Day after day they kept putting it off. But last week the ceiling was finally going to get done. Two days. Thursday and Friday. We had to move everything out as best we could and put plastic over what we couldn't move. But it's only for two days, right? Except . . .

They got the popcorn scraped off, sanded and started applying the mud. Which promptly rolled up and fell off. Thus bringing everything to a screeching halt until they could figure out why and what to do about it. Leaving us with a house like this:




Today (Monday) they decided the problem was the 100 tons of very fine dust everywhere, including our new cabinets and appliances, which was why we wanted the ceiling done FIRST. So today they put a coat of primer up. That should give the mud something to bond to. Then tomorrow they can mud, and Wednesday they can put the final coat of texture up. Which means we can finally start cleaning up this disaster area Wednesday or Thursday. If all goes according to plan, but what are the odds of that?

Our four-to-six week renovation project, now in week seven . . .

Let Us Salute a Brave, Brave Man

One of our colleagues, who shall remain nameless for his own protection, recently went above and beyond the call of duty. In the course of testing the ad system on the Ed Schultz website, this brave individual used his own credit card, thus creating a permanent link between this stalwart conservative and the progressive talk show host.

Top five potential consequences of this dangerous act:

5. Getting thrown out of Bill O’Reilly’s “Falafel of the Month” club.

4. An offer from Todd Palin to join him on a nice ride waaaay up into the mountains on his snow machine.

3. Every time you try to tune into Rush, the radio automatically goes to Air America instead.

2. Ending up on Obama’s e-mail list. Don’t open those messages, ‘cause they might infect your system with the insidious “hope” virus.

1. Liberal cooties!

Two friggin WHAT?

We faxed an outline and measurements of our countertop to the granite fabricators months ago. When looking through the slabs, we asked if one slab would be enough. Yup, no problem. The stuff we picked out had two slabs in the lot, one here and one in Idaho Falls. The showroom in Missoula assured us one was plenty. The showroom in Kalispell assured us one was plenty. The fabricators in Kalispell assured us one was plenty. The guy who made the template the other day assured us one was plenty.

The fabricators just called. They need two slabs. They'll get the one from Idaho Falls. In TWO FRIGGIN' WEEKS. They've had all the measurements and the exact slab we want for two months, and just today they realized, "Oh, I guess we do need that other slab they keep asking us about."

I wish I had another huge kitchen to remodel just so I could not do business with these idiots again.

So that means at least two more weeks of washing dishes in the downstairs shower. I'm still trying to pretend we're camping, but it only reminds me of why we never go camping. Because I hate camping. Especially when it's in my house.